Notes

aright, picture this: it's a summer evening. the sun has set but there's just enough cool light peering over the horizon to cast blue-black shadows over everything. the air is warm and sticky, and all you can hear is the incessant droning of cricket and cicadas, and every so often the lonely call of some bird or a car passing by as it drives down the distant road. if you look very carefully and don't blink, you'll see a firefly wink into and then out of existence every so often.

children aren't supposed to be out at that time. it's dangerous for them; there's wild dogs, hunting dogs, bears and snakes and coyotes you got to worry about, and besides, it's dark. it's all too easy for kids to wander off or get hurt and not be found in time, or be found in time by entirely the wrong thing.

i was young, and i was out, but i was being supervised by my uncle. we were in the back of the house, off near the shed. it's a ways from the house but someone standing on the porch could still see us. beyond the shed was the vegetable garden and off to the side of that was a big, empty field filled with dead, yellow grass almost as tall as me. beyond even that was the forest, thick and impenetrable in the darkness, surrounding the property in a ring like some kind of living fence.

i'd always wanted to go into the forest. tales like Narnia or bridge to Terabithia gave me a fascination with nature that my grandparents and uncle did their best to discourage, because out in the country, you don't go wandering off into the woods unless you've got a dog or a gun or both, especially not at night.

my uncle was busy fiddling with something on his tractor that was causing it to run funny, so i took to walking around the property, trying to catch fireflies or crickets. i was near the field, but not in it because i had on shorts and there were ticks and things that would bite you if you went into the grass. off near the woods, on the other side of the field, i saw movement, and i paused and perked up, and the movement paused and perked up, too.

i thought it was a rabbit, at first. it certainly had the ears of one. but the body was too long and too thin, and much, much too tall. if it was standing right next to me, it might have been my height counting its ears. my breath caught and my eyes widened, and i watched to see what it would do.

there was more movement and all of a sudden there were twenty or more of them, all standing on their back legs along the tree line. a car drove by and illuminated their eyes with its headlights, bright red like hellish embers, and still none of us moved. the whole experience felt uncanny. it was as though i'd stepped out of my own dimension and into this other, stranger one, where the fireflies and the cicadas and the fading light were the same, but these tall, thin, otherworldly beings were free to roam at night. they deserved the title harvestmen, i thought with horror, and not some silly mouthless spiders.

i felt ganged up on. but then somewhere in the distance, some animal or other screeched, and the beings all dropped to all fours and fled. the grass waved in the slipstream breeze they left behind, but soon it was as if they'd never been there at all.

later, when i was inside preparing for bed, i told my grandmother about it.

"i saw a bunch of rabbits," i said, ignoring my unease at the fact that they weren't rabbits, and i knew they weren't rabbits. but i didn't know what else to call them.

"that's nice," my grandmother said, and kissed me on the forehead before she left.

if i had said hares, maybe she would have reacted differently. maybe if i had told her that i saw a bunch of hares, she would have paused and given me an uncomfortable look, or glanced towards the window as if expecting to see a herd of tall, thin, otherworldlings standing out in the yard.

hares are not rabbits. hares cannot be rabbits, and you cannot ever confuse the two. after that day, i never did again. the sky was illuminated with moonlight, now, but the fireflies and cicadas and the molasses-slow shadows were still there. the hares were there, too. i could feel them even if i couldn't see them.

i shivered and pulled the blankets higher over my shoulder.